Rome Film Fest Unveils Two-Month Pre-Festival Film and Event Series

The ambitious series of events, which will run from September to November, will be organized by Mario Sesti, one of the Rome Fest's founders.

ROME – The parent organization of the International Rome Film Festival on Tuesday announced the renewal and expansion of a series of film-related events to take place in the National Museum of XXI Century Arts ahead of the festival itself.

The Cinema at MAXXI series, which will run on Saturdays and Wednesdays from Sept. 14 to Nov. 6, will feature a mix of retrospectives, roundtable discussions with actors and directors, lectures, and film and documentary previews, all within the state-of-the-art facilities at the MAXXI, just west of the main Rome fest headquarters at the Auditorium Parco della Musica.

The series will be organized by Mario Sesti, one of the founders of the eight-year-old Rome festival and the artistic director at Sicily’s Taormina Film Festival for the last two years.

The events will lead right into the Rome festival itself, which will run Nov. 8-17. The Rome festival will be run by President Paolo Ferrari and artistic director Marco Mueller for the second year in 2013.

The series will be divided into three parts: “The Forgotten: Great Italian Directors and Films to Rediscover,” “Meet Exceptional Men and Women,” and “MAXXI/Previews.”

“The Forgotten” will be composed of classics from post-War Italian cinema through the late 1970s, and will include related lectures and discussions. The first film in the series will be Pietro Germi’s classic Divorzio all’Italiana (Divorce Italian Style), and will include a discussion of the film with Sesti and Italian comic actor and director Carlo Verdone. Other directors slated to have films shown in the series are Mario Monicelli, Antonio Pietangeli, and Riccardo Freda.

“Meet Exceptional men and Women,” meanwhile, will include top recent documentaries, and will open with Girl Models from David Redmon and Ashley Sabin, which won a secondary prize at the Rome Film Fest two years ago.

And the “MAXXI/Previews” section will present a series of first glimpses (in Italy) of new productions, including Alicia Scherson’s The Future, starring Rutger Hauer and Nicholas Vaporidis, which earned strong reviews at the Sundance Film Festival this year.